what is even stranger is that Heraclitus expects his audience to understand it even before they hear it , It is not a subjective story but an objective Law which gives human experience its meaning. The second fragment emphasizes the 'communality' of the logos which exists independently of any individual's account of it. It is collective and, as becomes clear in the third fragment, completely abstract. What would one agree if one listened to it? 'That everything is one.'But there is a paradox. On the one hand' he maintains that it remains inaccessible to the very people whose lives it explain. For Heraclitus, humanity is sleep-walking through life, ignorant of the very principle which brings it into being. Heraclitus opens his book with the dual claim that his logs will hold forever and that we are unlikely to be able to understand it. From page one Heraclitus anticipates the sense of confusion with witch he has been received over the conturies and, what is more, the fact that we do not understand him is symptomatic of our inability to hear and understand the logos.
These three fragments powerfully pun on the concrete and abstract meaning of the word logos. What is constantly being elided here is Heraclitus. own account of the world in language his logos as words and the metaphorical notion of logos as a principle which underlies the functioning of the world. Heraclitus expresses the fundamental relationship between language and the world. Analogies with language are omnipresent in his work and Heraclitus seems to be suggesting that the structure of language uncannily mirrors the structure of thought and reality. An obsession with language at the expense of reality has often been seen as a distinctive feature of contemporary thought, but Heraclitus punning anticipates the linguistic turn of modern philosophy by several millennia
Heraclitus concentration on linguistics and logic soon gives way to the Pre-Socretic obsession with cosmology. Tn the fourth fragment, Heraclitus actually name this fundamental principle as fire, claiming that it, rather than earth, wind or water, is the